Meet The 13 Startups Wayra U.K. Is Accelerating In 2014

Wayra U.K. is still a relative newbie to the London startup accelerator scene, opening its doors back in May 2012 for its first intake. Last year’s cohort included journaling app Narrato and lesbian dating service Dattch, to name two of the 17.

Today Wayra U.K. is naming its third intake that will be hothoused through the circa nine-month mentoring programme centrally based, near London’s Goodge Street.

The startups were whittled down from a shortlist of 27 — plus one from a reserve list (Lobster) that stepped in to pitch in place of a finalist that dropped out. The shortlisted startups pitched the judges earlier this week and today during Wayra Week. (The startups that did not make the cut are listed at the end of this article).

Judging criteria for selecting which startups bagged a space in Wayra’s London academy — and the up to 50,000 Euros in funding that comes with it — focused on five factors: opportunity size, maturity, strategic fit, risk and innovation.

The strategic fit portion of the criteria refers to Wayra’s parent company, the global carrier Telefonica. What’s a hoary old mobile operator doing accelerating startups? Well, despite having massive customer bases to sell stuff to, carriers have typically been terrible at coming up with innovative new ideas that engage consumers. Telefonica’s workaround for plugging this ideas gap is thus to outsource “talent detection” to a global network of Wayra academies — which now extends to 14 academies in 12 countries.

Unfortunately Wayra U.K. would not disclose how many applications its London academy received this year, saying only that across its entire network of academies it’s had a cumulative total of 23,000 applications to date. Which is, as my TC colleague Steve O’Hear judiciously observed, “lame” in terms of putting its performance in context with other London accelerators.

Seedcamp, for instance, which has been running its bootcamp programme since 2007, released a swathe of data on its performance last September — at which point it said it had received 2,000 applications in 2013 alone.

Meanwhile, the newly-relocated-to-London Oxygen accelerator (unsurprisingly) had far fewer applications — just 310 – to its programme last year. And although also a newcomer to London, TechStars, which held its debut Demo Day in the U.K. capital last September, drew in 1,302 applications from 72 different countries — demonstrating the global pull of the TechStars brand.

It remains unclear how much traction Wayra U.K. is getting in attracting startups willing to hand over a portion of their business — and share their best ideas — in exchange for a little business acumen, a little investment and the chance to pitch a roomful of VCs and investors when the time comes to seek more money.

The new Wayra U.K. cohort will take up their desks in the London academy on February 17.

The shortlisted startups that did not make the cut this time were:

Zave App — Allows users to save and send money to an account by rounding up their bills.

Aeroline — Provides a web based solution that reduces the cost and risk of aerospace companies when conducting the approval of their suppliers.

Aire Score — A better credit scoring system for individuals, built ground up using newer data and algorithms.

Temptster — Über of the hospitality world.

StockFlare — The most user-friendly App that helps you make better investment decisions.

BitPoster — Ad exchange for the digital billboard market.

Student Tutors — A tutoring platform for university students to tutor in subjects related to their degree.